When I first created this website in 2005, I got a reasonable hosting package from home-business-host.com .

It only allowed 100MB of disk storage (but I didn’t need much), and a whopping 2Gb of bandwidth (Ie people on the internet could download 2Gb of data from my website per month).

Over the last few months, the amount of bandwidth that computer-aid.com.au would use had gradually crept up to about 1Gb per month… still a way to go before I hit 2Gb per month (or so I thought!).

Exactly on the last day of the month, around 3pm, I noticed I had an email saying my website had used 80% of its bandwidth. There was a similar email (1 minute later) which said I had exceeded the 2Gb bandwidth limit.

Yikes! The Computer Aid website was off the air!

I quickly contacted home business host, and Steve quickly bumped up my bandwidth to 5GB, just to get computer-aid.com.au going again. Thanks Steve, great response!

Looking over the website logs, it looked like my website pages only accounted for about 1GB of the bandwidth.

So where did the rest go?

I eventually found the answer in the http status codes… the 404 “document not found” accounted for 930Mb of bandwidth.

It seems that someone (or something) had been trying to load a non-existent page from my site… and kept trying until my bandwidth got used up.

At this stage, I can’t be sure if it was an attempt at sabotage, or if it was just a web spider that had gone haywire.

If it happens again, I’ll look into the stats more carefully and track down those responsible.